Cloudflare Outage, U.N. Adopts Trump Peace Plan for Gaza, EU Cracks Down on Russian Tourists, Ousted Bangladesh PM Sentenced to Death, Whither Vladimir Putin’s War?Frequent Business Traveler

Good morning! Today is Tuesday, the 18th of November, 2025. In this issue, George looks at the Trump peace plan adopted by the United Nations for the Gaza Strip. The United States was treated like a pariah by many countries at the United Nations for its position on Gaza-related issues.

In other news, George reports that Bangladesh’s ousted prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, was sentenced in absentia to death for “crimes against humanity,” and that over 1,000 people were injured at protests against the crime rate in Mexico over the weekend.

Russian tourists in EU hotels and streets are about to become a rare sight, George reports, due to the EU crackdown on issuing tourist visas to Russians.

Finally, the saying “a penny saved is a penny earned” has long been misattributed to Benjamin Franklin but this week in GEORGE, the “figure-of-the-week” offers a proof that shows how a penny saved is actually three pennies earned.

Have a good Tuesday, tīwesdæg or Tiu’s day, the Germanic god of war and justice, and George will see you tomorrow in our Wednesday Morning Edition.

An Original Heidelberg Cylinder printing press

At Press Time: A Cloudflare outage curtailed access to multiple popular websites for several hours Tuesday morning. It also caused an error that resulted in today’s issue of GEORGE going out without its headline as the server that transmits the newspaper was unable to retrieve the day’s headline.  The problem was resolved before 10 a.m. EST.  “A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved,” Cloudflare said on its status page at that time.  Dane Knecht, Cloudflare’s chief technology officer, posted an apology for the outage around that time, at the same time ruling out the possibility of a cyberattack. He said “today we failed our customers and the broader Internet… and I apologize for the impact that we caused.” This is a developing story and will be updated

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A stack of newspapers in Vienna’s Café Prúckel, each in an Original Wiener Zeitungshalter

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@INTERMEZZO III  Two Decades of Avenue Q Casts

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A Northern Lights-infused sunset last Thursday

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In what was described as a major breakthrough, the United Nations Security Council on Monday approved President Donald Trump’s peace plan for Gaza. The plan provides a legal U.N. mandate for the Trump administration’s vision of how to move past the current cease-fire and rebuild the Gaza Strip, which has been ravaged after two years of war. The vote was also a major diplomatic victory for Mr. Trump and the United States, the latter which has been isolated as the world’s recognized leader of peace and human development over its stalwart support for Israel and its government.

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At least 120 people, 100 of them police officers, were injured in protests against violent crime and the federal government on Saturday in Mexico City, police said. The protestors also marched in opposition to President Claudia Sheinbaum’s government. The protests said to have been organized by Gen-Z activitists who feel that Ms. Sheinbaum has done too little to address the problem of drug gangs and violent crimes in the country. While the country’s murder rate has fallen since Ms. Sheinbaum took office, it has nonetheless remained uncomfortably high.

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Market jitters over a possible AI bubble rose after shares in Nvidia closed 1.9% lower on news that Peter Thiel’s hedge fund had sold its stake in the chipmaker. The company that originally focused on GPUs, or graphics processing units, for video games and is now capable of causing a high level of hand-wringing will report third-quarter earnings on Wednesday after markets close.

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U.S. and EU passports of different vintages and designs

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The European Union is cracking down on Russian tourists, who can no longer get multiple-entry visas into the Schengen area, which comprises 25 of the 27 EU member countries, plus Liechtenstein, Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland. Going forward, visitors will have to apply for a new visa each time they travel to Europe, “allowing for close and frequent scrutiny of applicants to mitigate any potential security risk,” the EU’s executive branch, the European Commission, said in a statement. Exceptions will be made for people “whose reliability and integrity is [Sic] without doubt” such as  dissidents, independent journalists, or human rights defenders, and for close family members of Russians living in the bloc or family members of EU citizens living in Russia.

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It is an odd fact that, by the time next summer rolls around, the Russo-Ukrainian War will have lasted longer than the First World War, the latter which started on the heels of the assassination of Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Sarajevo in June 1914 and ended with an armistice that went into effect at 11:11 on 11 November 1918. That conflagration started with seven countries – namely Serbia, Russia, Montenegro, France, Belgium, Great Britain (including all of its colonies and possessions), and Japan, with the eventual addition of many more in the four years to come. [Editor’s note: For the incessantly curious amongst GEORGE readers, the list includes Italy, Portugal, Romania, United States, Cuba, Panama, Greece, Siam, Liberia, China, Brazil, Guatamala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Haiti, and Honduras.] Unlike the Allies and Associated Powers, each of which had clear objectives, Russia has no clear plan or objective.  It will likely continue to wage war against Ukraine,

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Ousted Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was sentenced to death in absentia by a court for crimes against humanity. A three-judge bench of the country’s international crimes tribunal convicted Ms. Hasina of crimes including incitement, orders to kill, and inaction to prevent atrocities as she oversaw a crackdown on anti-government protesters last year. As he read the verdict to the court, Justice Golam Mortuza Mozumder said the “accused prime minister committed crimes against humanity by her order to use drones, helicopters, and lethal weapons” against civilians. Ms. Hasina had pleaded not guilty, calling the tribunal a “politically motivated charade.” She currently resides in India.

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1970s Commodore Portable Mini Computer 899D

Figures of the week: one out of every two coins minted in the United States in 2024 was a penny, a one-cent piece; virtually no one-cent pieces were spent in the nationwide conduction of commerce; each one-cent piece – again, a penny – cost over three cents to mint.

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A group of musicians, ca. 1850

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Theater historian and critic @Thomashefsky is the newest addition to the ranks of GEORGE columnists. His ancestor, Boris Thomashefsky, born in 1881, arrived in New York City from Tarasche, a shtetl near Kiev, Ukraine. His greatest possession was a beautiful voice and young Master Thomashefsky earned money on the Sabbath by singing at the Henry Street Synagogue on the Lower East Side. During the week, he worked as a cigarette maker in a sweatshop, where he heard his fellow workers sing songs from the Yiddish theatre from the old country.

While Master Thomashefsky never attended the Yiddish theater in Kiev, he fell in love with its music and wanted to bring it to the United States. And that he did, almost singlehandedly. Between 1890 and 1940, as many as a dozen Yiddish theater companies staged regular performances New York City’s Yiddish Theater District, located primarily on Second Avenue and extending to Avenue B, between Houston Street and East 14th Street in the East Village. Both George and Ira Gershwin grew up within the borders of the Yiddish Theater District as did Irving Berlin. Meanwhile, Walter Matthau worked at several theaters in the district as concessions stand cashier. Still, the Yiddish Walk of Fame – similar to its namesake, the Hollywood Walk of Fame – remains in the district, with stars including Molly Picon, Menasha Skulnik, Fyvush Finkel, and of course Boris Thomashefsky.

The columnist @Borashefsky will provide theater reviews, essays on the history of various aspects of the theater and on plays and musicals, and essays on politics and theater. If there any comments, please note our columnist Bartleby’s policy as relates to change of any kind: “I would prefer not to make any change.”

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The stage of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” at the Lyric Theatre on Broadway

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‘AVENUE Q” PLANS WEST END REVIVAL IN 2026

“Avenue Q,” the Tony Award-winning musical set on an imaginary street in an unspecified outer borough of New York City where the rent is still affordable for 20-somethings just out of college, will receive its first West End revival just in time to celebrate the show’s 20th anniversary.

Performances will start on 20 March 2026 and run through 29 August, at the Shaftesbury Theatre. Written by Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx, and Jeff Whitty, “Avenue Q” will once again be directed by Jason Mour, the show’s original director, and will utilize the original Broadway show’s puppets by Rick Lyon. Sets will be Anna Louizos and orchestrations and arrangements will be by Stephen Oremu.

Come late March, the Avenue Q band will be back to accompany the opening cartoon rolled on the theater’s two monitors.

     The sun is shining,
It’s a lovely day,
A perfect morning
For a kid to play,
But you’re got lots
Of bills to pay –
What can you do?

While “Sesame Street” teaches kids about numbers and letters and even how to save money, the disarmingly cute “Avenue Q” steps in to rescue those who failed, teaching them about racism, finding a job, relationships, and even online porn.

“Avenue Q” opened off-Broadway in 2003, before transferring to Broadway later that year. It ran off-Broadway through May 2019. The original West End production opened in 2006, running through 2010. Productions have been mounted in Australia, Brazil, France, and Germany.

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Members of the original cast along with members of subsequent casts following the final performance of “Avenue Q” in 2019.

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Apple, which has historically the world’s largest company by market capitalization, is intensifying its succession planning efforts as it prepares for Tim Cook to step down as chief executive as soon as next year, it is understood.  The news was first reported by the Financial Times. Mr. Cook has been CEO for more than 14 years. The company’s board of directors and senior executives “recently intensified preparations for Cook to hand over the reins,” the report said. Mr. Cook, Apple’s former operations chief, turned 65 this month. He has led the company since 2011 when he took over the role from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who died several months later. John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice-president of hardware engineering, is widely viewed as Mr. Cook’s most likely successor, although no decision has been made or even discussed by the board.

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General Motors introduced a revised architecture of its vehicle computing platform which started in 2020 with the Vehicle Intelligence Platform that supported secure over-the-air updates, and in 2022 was further updated to unify dozens of infotainment modules into a single computing platform and to consolidate multiple advanced driver assistance systems into just one overarching system. The update that will be introduced in 2028 and will appear first in the Cadillac Escalade IQ will consolidate dozens of electronic control units into a unified computing core that coördinates every subsystem in the vehicle in real time. Many of the benefits from this move are quite straight-forward: The new centralized approach connects every system — propulsion, steering, braking, infotainment, and safety — through a high-speed Ethernet backbone and this, in turn, overhauls how GM vehicles will be built and how they can be updated going forward.

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The Full Harvest Supermoon photographed on 7 October 2025 at 5:41 a.m. EDT in New York City

The Forecast for Major Cities in North America, Europe, and Asia

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George: How to Consume News in a World of Information Overload

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Decades of research on how readers consume information when faced with Information Overload – led by George co-founder Jonathan Spira, one of the foremost authorities on the subject – ensures that each article gets straight to the point with no fluff and no bias.

George presents important news and events of the day clearly and concisely in a format better suited to the modern reader’s limited time and focus, without forsaking the founders’ traditional commitment to fact-driven news, commentary, and dispatches – all prepared by curious thinkers, for curious thinkers.

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Jonathan Spira, Tim Perry, Alexander Khusid, Christian Stampfer, Kurt Stolz, Anna Breuer, and Paul Riegler contributed to this issue of George.

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